Acts 2: 14a, 36-46

always good insights!

In early March, before the world changed, I traveled to Alabama with a group of Xavier University students. We were on a “civil rights immersion,” visiting Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery. In Montgomery, the Equal Justice Initiative has built a memorial for the victims of lynching and a legacy museum that tells the story of racial violence, from slavery to mass incarceration. I will never forget one particular image in the museum. It’s a photo from August 1920, 100 years ago, of a group of white men and boys in Shelby County, Texas, standing underneath dangling feet. A 16-year-old boy had been lynched. At least one man and one boy are smiling. It was haunting. And even more haunting: I could see myself in the faces of those white men. I was cut to the heart. I asked myself, “Would I have been standing with them? What am I doing today?”...

I just finished reading another of Kent Haruf’s simple, moving novels set in the high plains of eastern Colorado. In Benediction, the Rev. Lyle has taken a real chance in his sermon on the Sermon on the Mount. He dared to tie Jesus words about forgiving our enemies to the contemporary situation, including terrorism. Half his congregation stomps out in a rage, accusing him of being a traitor and a terrorist himself. After much pain and suffering, he agrees to leave that church and, he decides, the ministry altogether. Two old women try to talk him out of leaving, but he is thoroughly disillusioned. When they say, “People will get over this,” this is his reply. “Probably they will. But I won’t. People don’t want to be disturbed. They want assurance. They don’t come to church on Sunday mornings to think about new ideas or even old important ones. They want to hear what they’ve been told before, with only some small variations on what they’ve been hearing all their lives, and then they want to go home and eat pot roast and say it was a good service and feel satisfied.” His bitter words might be a good way to get your church to think about what they expect from and how they respond to Gospel preaching.

In her book, Speaking of Sin: the Lost Language of Salvation, Barbara Brown Taylor notes that the words “sin, “ “damnation,” “repentance,” and “salvation” sound as if they come “from an earlier time when human relationship with God was laced with blame and threat.” The words seem to judge us, which is why a lot of Christians don’t say them anymore. We go for grace instead. No confession of sin these days. Preachers like to say that like the waiting father in Luke 15 Jesus died with his arms wide open...

There's a line in the movie Rounders that I seem to come back to over and over. That's the poker movie from the late 1990s that stars Matt Damon and Edward Norton. In the film, in order to forestall the violent beating of his friend, Damon's character vouches for Norton's character, agreeing to accept the gambling debt of the latter as if it were his own. The two men work together, cheating at poker, in order to raise the money. Just when it looks like they are close to having enough, their dishonesty is discovered, and they lose everything. Damon's character must appeal to other friends and acquaintances, seeking a loan to prevent his own violent demise, and one of those would-be lenders begins to lecture Damon on where he went wrong. Damon's reply still bears truth in my own life: "This is the one time I don't need you to tell me how I [screwed] up. I know I [screwed] up. What I need from you is money."

["Allan came to me at my previous church in Hamilton, wanting to be baptized. He was a child (or victim) of the 'me decade' and felt compelled to leave home and family to find himself and, of course, lost himself, becoming a stranger to himself and the world, wandering the streets of Vancouver trapped in a world of drugs..."]

Michael was a bright and engaging Jew, married to a church member, and a faithful participant in our Bible study classes. There was rarely a question he could not answer or a theological idea that he could not explain. His God lived vibrantly but tensely in his mind. When Michael and Carol became the parents of a baby girl, they had to decide whether to baptize her. After much soul-searching, Michael agreed that Leigh Ann would be baptized, and stood with his wife as she made the promises for their child. Michael's hunger for scripture continued. In fact, his chewing upon the word became almost frenetic. I was not surprised when he finally came to see me. He was ready to be baptized. He was ready to follow the rabbi named Jesus. He was ready to believe. Why? Because in his intimate dance with scripture, in his intense study of the Gospels illumined by the Torah, Michael's heart had begun to burn within him -- and he had recognized the living God in the face of the risen Christ. In powerful ways, the Jesus described in the Bible had begun to get up off the pages and walk out into the world with him. Jesus had become Michael's traveling companion on the journey of his daily life...

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A psychiatrist had been struggling with a very difficult patient. "I’ve done everything I know how to do but you are still the same!" She sobbed and added, "I have failed to get through to you." From that moment, the patient began to show a dramatic improvement. She was moved by the depth of her therapist’s love for her. The shared wounds of the healer and the afflicted person proved therapeutic to both. Healing for the soul can only come from the hand of those who have been wounded. We minster to the sickness of our society, not from a position of superiority, from above, but along side of and with.