In every age of human history people have languished in jail cells, paying the price for their beliefs. This has been true since power and powerlessness have co-existed among us, and that is a very long time.  

Some have sat in prison because of the violence they have done others, bringing pain or death to other human beings.  Some have suffered punishment because they’ve refused to accept the authority of others, or because they have been misunderstood, or because they were falsely accused.  Some have been condemned to death and nailed to a tree on a hillside outside a capital city because their very life was deemed a threat to the status quo.

Some have recognized the injustice of laws passed and promulgated and forced unjustly upon a population, and have acted to challenge those laws.  Some have done this without advocating violence, indeed while preaching and working for a response that was non-violent, motivated by a love of justice, and ultimately by a love of all and of the God of all.

So Moses went in answer to the call of the God of Israel to Pharaoh to ask, preposterously, for the peoples’ release, for their freedom, for their life.  So Jesus rested among the crowd that wanted to hear him, and he asked them for more than they likely wanted to give: “Love your enemies, pray for those who abuse you.  Love those who hate you.  Lend to those from whom you have no hope of repayment.  Expect nothing in return.  Only love. Only love, whatever it costs you.”

So Martin Luther King Jr. went again and again into places and situations where injustice had domesticated justice, where despair had mastered hope, where hatred had seemingly bested love, and indifference grown a garden in the hearts of even the best.  He marched in where justice had fallen asleep, and lay unmoving for so long it was reasonably presumed dead.  And he said to the masters and the mastered, to the hopeless and the disinherited, to those who doubted the humanity of others and to those who doubted their own humanity: “Wake up! Stand up!  Know that justice does not die and cannot sleep forever.  Its roots are found in the God whom scripture says never sleeps, and the heart of that God is love.”

This marching, this speaking, this being a goad in the side of society cost Martin Luther King.  Long before shots rang out in April of 1968, all this cost him.  It brought him to the knife attack at a book signing that could have taken his life.  It cost him harmony and friendship with some of his fellow clergy.  It put pressure on the life of his family, and on their peace of mind.  It brought him to that jail cell in Birmingham, and to many others elsewhere.  

To be prophetic costs, always.  It always looks and sounds extreme, because it is.  To be prophetic is to step outside the normally accepted bounds, to step beyond the culture’s expectations.  It is to say to a world that does not want to be disturbed: “Wait!  Don’t you see this?  Don’t you hear this truth?  Don’t you want to understand?”  As scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann has taught us, to be a prophet is to see the same reality with an alternative vision, to possess the dubious gift of seeing reality in the way that God sees it, and to speak out of that alternate vision.  To speak out of that alternate vision is to say two things, neither of which is adequate without the other.  It is to speak a word of cogent, unrelenting criticism of things as they are, for always and everywhere the status quo is not what it should be.   But it is also to speak an energizing word from God, painting a living picture of the way things can and will be in the new creation.

That is the costly prophetic task.  It isn’t by any means everyone’s calling.  For most of us who work in an office, who handle money for its increase, who are called to make sure the baby’s diaper is changed and a meal is ready, for all of us who worry about being ready for retirement or simply ready for the next day – for all these the prophetic voice, if it is in us at all, seems tiny, far-away, almost impossible to hear.

That’s why there is always a need for the prophet to call to us from across the room, across the street, across the nation, across the passage of time.   He calls us to hear anew, to look again, to loose our imaginations from the anchor of conformity and, in a real way, to begin again, and again, and again.  She calls us to build this human world in the image of its Creator.  Whatever it costs.

While a prophet speaks, the world cringes.  The ancient Hebrews told the prophets to be silent, to go home, or to risk prison and death.  When the prophet’s voice ceases and falls into the past, then the world grows comfortable with the prophecy, begins quoting the prophetic words, declares a day in the prophet’s honor, and builds a monument.            

There is in us an unbidden urge to domesticate the prophet.  This is impossible while such an impossible person lives and shouts and travels the countryside.  But once they have left the world, the world begins the work of blending the prophet into the scene, into the culture, into the way things are.

This may be inevitable, but if it is, it is also worth challenging.  It’s worth my asking myself: would I have been transfixed by the words of Jesus if I heard him speak by the sea and on the hills two millennia ago?  Would I have left everything, as some did, and followed this unknown rabble-rouser?  Or would I, as most did, let him pass by?

If I were living in Egypt in the days of Moses, if it were my home, my nation, how would I have reacted if I had witnessed Moses’ words to Pharaoh, asking freedom for the Hebrews?

King’s letter from a Birmingham jail, a portion of which we’ve heard this morning, contains other words less often quoted, words that refuse to be domesticated, words that can sting our ears even now, a half-century later.  Words like these:

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; . . . when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

Even now I have left out the hardest of his words to hear.  We may say that most of the particulars of those situations have long since changed and are gone.  Yes, but we need reckon still with the underlying fact that in this ever-smaller world there are yet children who suffer because of their race; there are women who suffer because of their gender; there are peoples who are oppressed because of the language they speak or the culture they insist on carrying into the future.  There are men and women around the world who risk imprisonment, torture, and death because they dare to love one another.  There are families who face starvation because of the accident of the region into which their mother bore them.

And they number in the billions.  

But even if there were only one, there would still be need in this human world for God to raise up the voice of the prophet.

So for me at least, there is little comfort in the celebration of Martin Luther King today.  Certainly not because of anything lacking in his response to what he recognized as wrong and in need of being made right.  Certainly not because he raised his voice insistently rather than allowing silence to swallow outrage whole.  Not because of any lack that any one of us might point out in him, who like us was a fallible human being.

No, there is little comfort in this day for me because when I read him again, when I see the film of his speeches, he adamantly refuses still to be domesticated.  And his example, like that of his Lord and of Moses and others before him, raises stinging questions to me, to you I think as well, and to the whole church.

What am I willing to march about?  What is enough to get me out into the street?  Is there anything that I care that much about? What call of justice or cry for mercy is enough to make me raise my voice even if I know that the powerful will call for silence?  For what cause am I willing to lose my freedom, even for a night?  For what people oppressed or in need or alone in the world am I willing to give up my time, my safety, my life?

Martin Luther King’s legacy insists that these questions be alive in us, for us, among us.  As long as we live.  As long as the status quo is less than the Kingdom of God.  Even if I never march for a cause.  Even if you never speak at a rally.  Even if my life is never required of me.  Even so, he has left these questions to agitate like the ‘thorns in the flesh’ of which St Paul once complained.  For that, we can be grateful.  

Grateful, in the extreme.  

~ The Rev. John McGinty

I am sharing again what I wrote a year ago: I didn’t get it right this past year, and there’s another year coming, and it’s time to keep on keeping on.

The Year Ahead

Reading and listening today on 1/1/11, I find both news of the individual resolutions for change of men and women around the nation and world, as well as a number of public predictions and wish-lists for the public world we all share.  I believe that the two are indivisible.  The considerations of any one of us as to how I need or want to change have to be seen in the context of the world around us.  There is no “I” that is not part of a larger “we.”  What I do has effects far beyond me.  What we do, in any part of this human world, has impact on me and on individuals near and far.

If there is any truth in this, what can I say in one small voice about the year that we are about to share and to live together?

This year,

I want to be honest and truthful in my dealings with others, in the words that I use and the deeds I undertake.  I will state, sincerely and openly, what I really believe, and then be prepared to listen to the truth my partner in conversation has to share.  To do so is to show respect both for others and for myself.   The premise here is that I have something of import to say about my life, the issues of the day, and about the state of the planet, and so do all others.  Some are better informed and educated than others, but all have an inviolable human dignity, a right to speak and be heard, a stake in what happens around us.  This is true in relation to governments, to churches, and to every institution large and small with which any person relates.

In the larger world, we could do with the leadership of our nation sounding more like leaders of the nation and less like ideologues of their political parties.  In times that are asking consistently more of our common creativity and commitment in order to devise together solutions to problems that might not have been imagined by our forebears in terms of either substance or extent, we need everything our leaders have to offer.  Staying on party message while the world shifts violently again and again is the least helpful approach to forging any possible future.

In other words, personally and publicly, let’s say what we mean, not what party or family or institutional attachment necessarily expects or urges us to say.

This year,

I will believe that more is possible.  I have seen in prior years that more pain, more destruction, more war and more disintegration is possible, and probable.  I realistically accept that I will see that ‘more’ as long as my eyes respond to the light.  But this year I choose to believe in another ‘more.’  I believe that I can connect more deeply to friends and family.  I believe that I can respond more genuinely to the needs of people I know well and to people whom I pass once here on the streets of New York.  I believe that I can find the energy within to become more truly the man that I am called and enabled by God to become.  I believe that I have not yet begun to mine the possibilities within for expression, for commitment, for excellence.

When I look at the world around me, I will look this year with eyes attuned to the ‘more.’  There is more common ground that we can discover together regarding who we are as a people, and who we hope to be.  There is more we can do to find ways to provide medicine for those who suffer, and to keep healthy those who are.  There are more ways that we can connect the ideas and the commitment of the young among us to the needs of those who are nearer the end of life, for a sharing of experience, wisdom, and possibility.  There is more we can do to bring believers of various faiths together in conversation, there to see that as great as their differences are, there are resources in each of their traditions that can be mined to face the challenges of these times as one.  There is more to hope for, even in the face of a difficult present and an unseen future.  There is more reason to choose hope, even when it seems blind, than to choose despair.  There is more that unites the child in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn to the child on the outskirts of Beijing than will ever meet the eye.

In other words, times of supreme challenge are the last times in which, personally or publicly, we should retreat only to what we have already known, and fail to envision something that has never yet been seen.  There is always something new, and it is not always bad.  Sometimes it brings the re-creation of the established by the unpredicted.

This year,

I will love beyond reason.

Reason has its considerable value.  I have never advocated for an unreasonable or unreasoned life.  I won’t this year either.  But while reason remains in his accustomed seat, love will be allowed to enter the scene, perhaps descending unexpectedly in a bright yellow hot-air balloon, perhaps being spoken from the lips of the seemingly least likely character.  Beyond what reason asks of me, I will be willing and open to love the unlikely, even the apparently unlovable.  After all, they by definition need to be loved most of all.  Can I love Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity?  It appears unreasonable to try.  All the more reason to do so.  And can Mitch McConnell love Barack Obama?  While only he can answer that question, he should know he has a responsibility – new with this new year – to answer anew.  And in the quiet rooms and the private places of living as well, there perhaps above all, love can trump reason in ways that will make this year worth living.

The death of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ strikes broadly.  I mean this: beginning this year, do ask what is lovable in those you meet, and do tell them what you see in them that you love.

This year,

I will not tire.  There is too much at stake.

The news can drag me down with its daily litany of failures, of acts of hatred, of the celebration of misunderstanding.  Personal responsibilities can at times and for periods weigh heavily on any of us and slow our steps or change our direction.  This year I will take as my own the ancient words of the prophet Isaiah:

God doesn’t come and go. God lasts.

He is Creator of all you can see or imagine.

He doesn’t get tired out, doesn’t pause to catch his breath.

And God knows everything, inside and out.
He energizes those who get tired,
gives fresh strength to dropouts.

For even young people tire and drop out,
young folk in their prime stumble and fall.
But those who wait upon God get fresh strength.
They spread their wings and soar like eagles,
They run and don’t get tired,
They walk and don’t lag behind.”

(Isaiah 40: 29-31, The Message)

These are not days that allow for exhaustion.  I’m not advocating for denial when energy lags, as it will.   Rather I am admonishing myself and you not to let our lowest moments on a given day or throughout the year define either who we will be or what will be the history we write together from this day forward.  Not only do our times ask for our best.  They also ask that our best become better – much better.

This year,

I will not stop here.  Every hour and day of 2011 may mock what I’ve written above, mock it both in the most private moments and in the moments that will define and redefine our world.  This only means that this and other musings on the year ahead have to be re-examined and re-written as often as necessary to keep them fresh and real, and directed to the actual situations in which we live.  So I will return to this page, and so should we each I think, to like pages of our own, and to the common page upon which we are all writing together as darkness falls on this first day of the still-new year.

Alexander Smith the Scottish poet (31 December 1830- 5 January 1867) said:

“Christmas is the day that holds all time together.”

That is a thought to hold, particularly as each individual celebration of Christmas arrives at a moment when everything seems to be falling apart.  Amazing and harrowing consistency there.

We humans find ways in every new year to oppose one another, to grouse, to forget the past, to fight again and again, and to learn (if at all) only ever so slowly.  So this Christmas we find ourselves within days of the ‘end’ of the longest war in the history of the USA (and that is saying something), and already the nation born out of that conflict in its present form, Iraq, is racing to fall apart politically and in terms of renewed and horrendous violence. 

Yet we will continue to believe, many of us, that there is reason for war, and that the reason this happens now is because the war was not long enough.  Might it not be instead, as the tiny Infant whose birth we recall this coming Sunday might remind us, that the peace is not long enough, and never has been?

How does Christmas Day hold all time together?  That day opens up into an eternal Day without end; a day filled with the light of the Christmas star,  with the light and the wisdom of the Child who grew up to be teacher and healer and self-giving-to-death Savior.  That eternal Day is always this day.  It is always directly before us.  It is always right here.  The only thing we need do to recognize that dawn is to accept it.  But instead, if you’re like me, you probably think that today, just for one more day, I may have a better idea of how things should be.  A better idea than the One who sent the Son to be born of woman in Bethlehem.

I pray that, despite our commercial and corporate lunacy, that this past has been a good year for you and your loved ones.  I pray that at least some of these past months of days have opened to a glimpse of the Day that will last forever.  And I pray the same may be true of even more of the days to come.  Many of you I see only infrequently since my move to New York.  That doesn’t mean that you are not on my mind and in my heart day to Day.  You are.  You are precious to me.  You have helped to form my life thus far, and in doing so, know it or not, you have been tender and effective tools in the hand of God.

I pray for you tonight, that this Christmas – in the midst of the turning world – may be for you the day that holds all time together, and the opening to a new and beautiful Day.

Love always,

John

Worth 10 minutes of your time.

So opens the word of God on this Advent season, this new year of the church’s life. It opens with a cry from the human heart God-ward, a cry that could only be heard by deity, only answered – if it is to be answered – by the one who is the Source and the Hope of all that is, the one who is both our origin and our place of arrival.

To that One, in the 64th chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah, returned home from exile, facing hopes for a renewed nation, a re-built Temple, and a reinvigorated economy that were fading fast in the face of factions who could only revile one another, the voice of God’s people through the prophet speaks. They say, “You are our only hope. In times past you did astounding deeds. Our fathers and mothers have told us. Do astounding deeds now. We are sinners, living in a sinful land. No one calls out to you from this place, but today we must. We are the clay, and you Father are our potter. We are the work of your hand. Now, re-shape us, re-create us, whatever it takes. Make us and our land new.”

This call is repeated by the psalmist today. “The only bread we have is tears. Bowls of tears are our only drink. Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine on us; only in that light can we be saved!”

What kind of beginning to Advent is this? The world around us, long before the Thanksgiving turkey had been stuffed and placed in the oven, has been stringing the lights; cuing Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Burl Ives from the great beyond; calling us to rejoice and to sing and to hang the mistletoe, and above all, to shop with abandon. But here in this place dedicated to the Grace that flows from the Divine One, the season opens with a cry of devastated hearts to God, a final desperate cry rising up to say: Save us! Save us from complacency. Save us from despondency. Save us from living blithely along the surface of life. Save us from the worst of ourselves and save us for the best of ourselves. Save us for love. Save us for service. Save us for joy. Only you, Lord God, can do it. Tear open the heavens and come down! Let the mountains around us shake as you come. Do something unexpected and new.

Not long ago I was getting new license plates for my car. New York plates. I chose plates that help support cancer research, and I was given the chance to choose the letters and numbers that will be on the plates. As you might imagine, tried and true possibility after tried and true possibility were all taken. Finally I decided to fall back on my family heritage and I chose a word in Gaelic. The word is Anois, a n o i s. It means ‘now.’ My thought at the time was that the word reflects a spirituality that invites us to remain ever in the present moment, attentive to what is happening here and now; more importantly attentive to what God is doing in this precise passing moment.

Anois. I think this may be the word for me this year as Advent begins. Forget what may be happening next week, or three weeks from now, or on Christmas Day. Never mind that I know, and that I will celebrate again, the amazing gift of God come among us as one of us in the Incarnation. That comes later. But now. What is God doing now?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyr to the faith in the last century, preached a sermon on “the coming of Jesus into our midst.” His words, spoken many years ago, can call us today to the now of this moment, the anois of this opening Advent season.

Bonhoeffer said, “It is very remarkable that we face the thought of God coming among us so calmly. . . . We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God,” our modern-day prophet says, “is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.”

The Israel for whom Isaiah spoke lived in a time of societal upheaval, of the collective inability to put things right; a time of economic near-ruin and political near- paralysis. The Israel to whom Jesus speaks in apocalyptic terms in the 13th chapter of Mark’s Gospel lived in a time and place in which they were not their own. Greater powers dictated much of their lives, and there appeared to be little they could do about it. The major forces were forces beyond the control of the ordinary people; the disparity between the powerful and the powerless was beyond reckoning; the distance between the experience of life of the wealthy and that of the impoverished was almost immeasurable.

So these were times not unlike our own. In their respective ‘nows’, these ancient Israels chose to call on God as their hope. They chose to know themselves, and to be known to the greater world, as people of God. They chose to be awake and aware of the presence and the action of God among them, even if that action seemed to be almost unnoticeable, unseeable, at the time. They chose to make known publicly their vulnerability. In word and action they said, “We are alone. We feel powerless. We don’t know how to move from our present place to something better. We need help. We need God. We need God not only to open up possibility for us. We need God to tear the top off the world, to break through the heavens, to do things that have never been done before, to change everything. And we dare, weak as we are, to ask for all that.”

In our time, in our Advent, in our now, are we able, are we willing, to be as honest and as vulnerable as they were in their times? As we do buy the tree and hang the wreaths and hum the familiar Yuletide tunes, as we write the cards and plan the next holiday meal and the travel it will take to reach that table over the next few weeks, can we allow at least this space, this sacred space where we come together to keep Advent, to pray Advent, to be a place where our vulnerability and need can be revealed? Can we make this a table around which we are not afraid to admit that we hunger, and that only this bread can begin to fill us? Can we trust one another to be men and women who dare to live in this present moment, this now, this anois, as our children always do, and there to be people open to God, and to God’s plan to ‘draw near and lay claim to us’?

I dare say we can. If we can, we will find more in this present moment than we otherwise would ever know. More of the greatness of God, and of the great potential we are as God’s people.

The poet Luci Shaw puts the challenge in words so well in her poem, “…for who can endure the day of his coming?”

“Sterile skeptics, yet we may be broken
to his slow, silent birth, his beginning
new in us. His big-ness may still burst
our self-containment to tell us,
without angels’ mouths, Fear not.

God knows we need to hear it, now,
when he may shatter with his most shocking
coming, this proud cracked place,
and more if, for longer waiting,
he does not.”

Joshua directs the priests and people of the Lord across the Jordan River into the Promised Land that will be Israel. There must be such a sense of arrival, of a kind of completion, of reaching an end-point that had been desired for so long. But there is something to carry. The priests stand at the river’s edge and then on the riverbed, bearing their burden, the Ark of the Lord, the dwelling place of the Holy One of Israel. The burdens of slavery, of exile, of homelessness are fading to the past. But there will be new burdens to bear.

Paul the Apostle writes to the Thessalonians. He writes of his affection for them, of his longing to see them again, of the fact that he feels himself a father to them. He lets them know that he realizes what they have suffered; that he stands with them in their persecution. And, first of all, he reminds them that he had worked diligently when he was among them, “so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God.” The one thing that he did not want to be to them; the one thing he asserted he never was to them, was a burden.

And Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, speaking of what is lacking in the way of the Pharisees, says, “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.”

Not every river stands up and behaves itself when God’s people pass by, as did the Jordan that day for Joshua and his people. Last week I stood by the side of apparently innocent streams in the state of Vermont, which rose up as hurricane Irene passed by, and left behind homes lifted up and thrown down, livelihoods and hopes wounded and destroyed. If you’re able to go on the service trip upstate on November 11, go. Rivers are often channels of life. They can also bring burdens of sorrow and leave them along the banks for the people there to struggle against.

Burdens. We all carry them. Sometimes we are aware of them. Sometimes not. Sometimes we can name them. Sometimes they remain anonymous. But their weight remains.

Where do they come from, these burdens we carry? Do you carry a weight of sorrow? Do you know where its genesis lies? And if you do, do you know also how it has survived and grown from that starting point to become the burden you bear today? Do you carry a burden of regret? How did it first begin? And why is it still with you today? Does loneliness weigh you down? Can you name your burdens? Can you count them? Do you dare? Do I?

If God is a good God, if the divine kindness is embodied in Jesus Christ and among us still today and always, then why are there burdens among us? Why, if we could pause the flowing river of life at any given moment at Connecticut Muffin or at Teresa’s Restaurant or in the line at Rite Aid and listen to the inner stories of everyone in that space, would we hear stories that inevitably include – whatever else may be there – the carrying of burdens, psychic, emotional, physical and spiritual? Why?

When I say it here, standing in a pulpit in a beautiful church in the midst of the celebration of a time of prayer, it sounds like a rhetorical question, doesn’t it? A high-falluting question asked from an altitude above: why do these humans suffer? But it’s not a question of rhetoric is it? It is instead a question of life – and of death. It’s a question of flesh and blood and spirit, and the intersection of all of these.

Each of us, if we dare, inches gropingly, or perhaps even strides confidently, toward our own answer to the question of why we carry the burdens we carry. I can only share with you something haltingly of my own response. I’ve known love as a burden, and the lack of love as well. I’ve known anger as an oppressive weight, but I’ve known a lack of strong feeling as a burden too. I have felt faith itself as a thing that requires more of me than I am willing to give, but the lack of faith as a burden even heavier. Heavier by far.

There are many more as well, burdens of my own. When I think of them soberly and quietly, that last phrase becomes most important: “burdens of my own.” For myself, as I look back, most of the burdens I have known – at least most – have been fashioned by my own hands, or shaped by my own psyche. The book of Genesis tells us that God created all things good. It took human eyes to see any of that creation as lacking in goodness. I don’t believe that God, the Father of Jesus Christ, the Giver of the Spirit, spends time devising burdens to strew along my path. I believe God places blessings there in abundance. Some of them I recognize, rejoice in, and accept with joy. Some of them I trip over, fall over, fail to recognize and curse. I see them lying along the way behind me, and I call them burdens.

But even so, God continues to place renewed good things in my way.

I need new eyes. I need new ears. I need a new heart. I need re-creation.

With these gifts, burdens become something else altogether, at least in potential. They become the source of new freedom.

Do you remember “The Mission”? It’s a film about the Jesuit missions in 16th century South America, with Jeremy Irons and Robert Deniro. Deniro’s character is a villain, a mercenary, an enslaver of the natives of the land.

He is touched by something – Christians might call it grace – and something, everything, begins to change. As penance for his past, which he is determined to do, he takes all the instruments of torture and violence that have been his over the years, binds them in a huge weighty pack. He hoists that grievous weight on his back and begins to climb the nearby mountain. He struggles and agonies and makes his way to the top. There the native people he has disdained meet him; they cut the burden off his pack and heave it downward into the river. The new man, free and immeasurably light, lies on the earth and sobs with all the emotion of a long human lifetime. He cries while those around him caress his hair, embrace him, lean into his back where the burden had been and gently touch him. His tears continue unabated as his sorry changes into joy.

He made the burden. He recognized it for what it was at last. He carried it upward and allowed himself to be freed. At that moment he was more truly human, and more truly himself, than at any prior moment since he emerged from his mother’s womb into this world of rivers and apostles and Pharisees and saviors, this world that can look – sometimes for years – like it is the work of the giver of sorrow. But no, it is instead the gift of the One who has made all that is to be a lasting joy. In the end it will all be recognized as gift, and all received with joy.

In the end the only burden that will remain is the one the priests bore into the Jordan River on that fateful day of arrival and hope. We carry the ark of the presence of the glory of God. We carry what Jesus called the ‘burden that is light and the yoke that is easy.’

As a fellow believer sang it four centuries ago: “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing; our helper he amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing. … let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also; the body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still; God’s kingdom is forever.”

John P. McGinty

October 30, 2011
Scriptures: Joshua 3:7-17, 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13, Matthew 23:1-12.

Freed of the burden.

This coming Monday, for the 117^th time we in the United States will celebrate Labor Day as a federal holiday.  The impetus for the passage of the legislation establishing the holiday came when tensions between striking workers and law-enforcement led to violence and death in 1894.  Here in the early 21^st century, there is simmering discontent and disagreement over the role of workers’ unions, the relation between the states and public employees, and more.  These are vitally important questions upon which every citizen, and every church, should have an informed opinion and a strong voice.

Today we live in an economic situation in which unemployment, the lack of work to be had, remains a painful experience for so many.  The 9.1% national unemployment rate at the end of July becomes so much more than a number when it reveals the painful individual stories of countless wage-earners  and their families of every background and history across the nation.  This number is so much greater among several minority groups in the USA.  Looking beyond our own borders, 14.4% of workers in Ireland are idled (as of August 31) as well.

Behind all of this history, rancor – and also accomplishment – lies the fundamental nature and importance of work in human life.  While faith celebrates first who we are as beloved creatures of God, made in God’s image, what we do is experienced as foundational in life.  What we do is a prime avenue by which we understand ourselves and identify ourselves to one another.  One of the measures of a fulfilled and happy life is to be doing what you feel yourself called to do.  It is a human joy to complete an undertaking and recognize it as a ‘job well done.’

One of the jobs that redound powerfully in the life of every believer apprenticed to the way of Jesus Christ is the job of caring for one another.  Christians never really work only for themselves.  Though we may not be aware of this truth at every moment, to do so might be wildly beneficial both to the way we work and the joy it can provide us.  We work for one another.  We work for a common good.  We work for the common good.

To wit: I work for you.  But in ever-widening concentric circles of connection, I work too for the good of this neighborhood, of this city and state and nation.  I work for the suffering people of Syria and the hopeful of Libya.  I work for the millions in imminent danger of starvation in the Horn of Africa, beyond the borders of my peripheral vision, but not beyond my responsible care.  And so do you.  We work for and with one another.  And together we work for the first Worker, the One who set the whole thing in motion in time beyond time, whose heart is all and only love.

You see, labor is a beautiful thing.  This Monday, celebrate it well.

John P. McGinty

Staying afloat amid information overload | Faith & Leadership.

If you interface with technology at work or home – and most of us certainly do in 2011 – this is well worth a read.

In fact, the Leadership Education offerings from Duke Divinity School are consistently excellent.  Consider subscribing.