2 Corinthians 4: 7-15 (links validated 5/19/24a)

Rabbi Edwin Friedman got my attention with the idea of paradox in his book, Generation to Generation, which deals with anxiety in family systems. His thesis is this: the more that fixing a particular person or solving some particular problem dominates a family, the less likely is that person to change or that problem to be fixed. Forcing solutions is seldom a good idea for long-term change. Nobody ever found serenity through gritted teeth. Rabbi Friedman's advice is pure paradox: Instead of doubling down on the effort to make another human being change, let go...

John Lewis’s memoir is titled Walking With the Wind. The title comes from an incident in his childhood when lovely summer day turned into a fierce storm. "About fifteen of us children were outside my aunt Seneva’s house, playing in her dirt yard,” he wrote. Aunt Seneva gathered them inside the little shotgun house. Their laughter and play had given way to quiet terror. The wind howled, the rains pounded, and the house began to shake, then to sway, and the wooden floor boards upon which they stood began to bend. “And then,” he wrote, “a corner of the room started lifting up…This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky” with all of them inside. Aunt Seneva instructed the kids line up and hold hands and to walk together toward the corner of the room that was rising. Back and forth they went from the kitchen to the front, “walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of [their] small bodies.” Lewis reflects, “More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.” “It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams—so much tension, so many storms...

In one of his many fine sermons the Rev. Dr. John Timmer once gave a vivid baptismal image involving fisherman along the Irish coast. Once upon a time each fisherman wore a very distinctive wool sweater. Such sweaters kept them warm during cold months at sea but these sweaters had another use, too: identifying the dead. When a fisherman drowned at sea, it didn’t take long for the rough, cold, brackish waters to disfigure the body beyond recognition. So when a body washed ashore, it was as often as not identified by way of the design on the sweater. Charley McSween might be unrecognizable by the time his body bobbed ashore but one look at that red sweater with the blue diamonds on it, and everyone knew who he was. As Timmer pointed out, this meant that every day those fishermen wore on their bodies a reminder of death. And that’s what baptism does, too. We are marked with Jesus’ death. In some traditions infants and adults alike receive also a chrismation in which the sign of the cross is made on the forehead with some oil. It’s a reminder that baptism places us under the cross, under that signal sign of death.

There’s a man, dying alone at home. “His doctor, traveling by horse and buggy, came to make a house call. He went everywhere with his faithful dog, whom he left on the front porch as he entered the home of his patient. The patient, lying in bed, said to the doctor, ‘Doc, I’m scared. What’s it going to be like on the other side?’ At that moment the doctor’s dog began scratching at the door and whining, hoping to be let in. The doctor said, ‘Do you hear my dog scratching at your door? He’s never been in your house. He doesn’t know anything about the inside of your home. Here’s the only thing he knows: His master is on the other side of that door. And if his master is inside, it must be okay, and it is where he wants to be. That’s what heaven is like.’ Believing this about death changes how we face our mortality.” Hamilton says. “It doesn’t mean we have no fear, only that we’re not controlled by fear. It means that, despite our fear, we can live with real hope.”...

there is a statue down in New Orleans, a figure of a woman seated in a rocking chair, holding a child in her arms. The only carved word on that monument is the single name: Margaret. But to those who lived in New Orleans at that time, the name was all that was necessary. For Margaret was a familiar figure throughout the city, known for one great passion, her love of children. As a young immigrant girl she had come to New Orleans to find a new home and life. In a few years she had achieved her highest dream. She married a fine man and together they had a lovely daughter. Then in a brief span of time she lost them both to illness. After a time of bereavement, she first began to work in orphanages where she could help care for other children. Then, because of her skills in baking, she began to sell her goods, peddling them from a cart through the streets of New Orleans. She prospered in this, and was able to open a bakery which in time became a successful chain of bakeries. Yet Margaret never changed her basic style of life. Most of the proceeds from her business were used to establish and maintain orphanages where children could find refuge. She explained what happened by saying, "I put into my work all the compassion of my old grief." Subject to every kind of hardship, we never despair; pursued we are never cut off; knocked down, we still have some life in us. It's the only way to die and live. The great Albert Schweitzer once said, "The world is mysteriously full of suffering." But he also said, "The world is mysteriously full of the overcoming of suffering"...overcoming which leads to life."

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