Single-tasking

Proper 25-A; October 23, 2011

Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 90

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

We baby boomers – born between 1946 and 1964 – are used to seeing ourselves at the center of the universe – well, of the marketing universe that caters to our desires. We are the great bulge, moving from babyhood to elementary school to fast times at Ridgemont High. We went to college in a tie-dyed, denim-clad group, entered the workforce in our Oxford button-downs at the same time – and are now, in our relaxed khakis and comfy sweaters, entering our 60s. We read a passage like this one, from Deuteronomy, with new eyes – eyes perhaps not as clear as those of Moses:

Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigor was not abated.

That sounds good to me. I’m not even half-way there!

Moses is astounding, not only for his long-lived clarity of vision, but for his single-mindedness. Once he took on God’s plan to move the people of Israel out of Egypt and to the Promised Land, that was all he did. His eyes were on the prize, and he kept going, despite all the setbacks that whining people and wilderness roads put in his path.

Commendable as that is, the culture we live in seems to pull us in another direction – or rather, far too many directions at once. Have you seen that commercial about the man who has forgotten that it’s his wedding anniversary? His wife calls up, while he is focused on some project at his desk, and all of a sudden, through the magic of this particular cell phone, he can simultaneously reassure his wife that he has NOT forgotten their date, make a reservation at their favorite restaurant and have flowers delivered at their home, all at the same time. But we don’t see this couple at dinner. Is the husband frantically finishing his work project from the restaurant table, texting while his wife is looking at the menu, e-mailing a document while she goes to the ladies room, pretending to calculate the tip while he is really tweaking a spreadsheet?

I’m enough of a baby boomer to be shocked! shocked! that college students aren’t necessarily taking notes on their laptops connected to the internet in their lecture halls – but also to agree that it is kind of handy just to send that one more text from my phone while I am sitting at a red light on Genesee Street. Sitting in the driver’s seat, of course.

Multi-tasking and its discontents are in the air we breathe.

Today’s gospel is for us:

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"

That question cuts through all the noise, doesn’t it? In the face of all that is around us, Teacher, all the confusion and crashing that affects even us little people here, what does God want us to do?

The Gospels present us with the picture of a changing world. The old understanding of faith in God – follow all the many laws, listen to the authorities like scribes and Pharisees – the ones who symbolically sat in Moses’ seat – is being challenged by this one particular teacher, this Jesus, who seems to embody in his person all the hope and good news and promise of God, the God who has been made known through the law and the prophets. Whom do we follow? We can hear the concern in the voices of the people: if we follow Jesus, do we have to abandon everything we have known about God up to now?

From the midst of all these questions and confusions and options and interpretations, Jesus breaks through with remarkable simplicity:

"`You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

What Jesus is saying is, Keep your faith where it has always been: with God. As he spars with those religious leaders trying to entrap him into making some big mistake, he makes it clear that his faith is with God, and with the essentials that God has always, always, always been trying to get across to us. This is the big thing that everything hangs from. This is the start, the first, the banner headline screaming across the top of the newspaper: Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. Everything starts with this. Anything else is distraction, multi-tasking with no result, mere interruptions that take us away from giving ourselves fully to the God who loves us and wants us to love back, and wants us to love all these other people whom God loves, too. In this ever-widening circle of care and concern lies our treasure, our heart, our true home.

 

Yesterday, when we were raking the yard and cleaning up the building, we found this: a robin’s nest, a work that took extraordinary focus, determination and clarity of purpose. It is an astounding creation, hard as concrete yet light as a feather. The bird knows just what nest works for those eggs and those babies. All the grass and twigs and paper and I don’t even know what in the world comes down to just this one, perfect nest.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. You, too, can learn the art of single-tasking.

Render unto ...

Proper 24-A; 10/16/2011

Exodus 33:12-23; Psalm 99

1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

The newspaper headlines Friday morning were scooped, as is often the case, by the radio and internet. It turned out that the Occupy Wall Street protesters were not after all to be evicted from their camp in a park in lower Manhattan. Mayor Bloomberg announced that a deal had been struck; the protesters and the owner of the park would negotiate how to keep the park clean. The newspaper pictures showed earnest, long-haired, tattooed-types pushing brooms on sidewalks and heaving huge plastic bags of demonstration detritus. For the time being, Caesar, or at least Mayor Bloomberg, had been rendered unto. In the words of “the street,” a deal had been done, and the Mayor got what he wanted, apparently a promise of a cleaner park, a mollified property owner, and orderly protesters.

We Americans -- founded on biblical principles since the Puritans came to a reformed England in North America to found a city on a hill, a beacon of righteousness for all the world to see – we Americans have a long history of protesting economic arrangements, from taxes to big banks, that strike us as unfair. The tea in Boston Harbor was neither the beginning nor the end. Andrew Jackson became president on his opposition to the central banks. Nineteenth-century populists nearly elected another president, William Jennings Bryan, who was opposed to putting the currency on the gold standard. Explicitly Christian, Bryan’s famous “cross of gold” speech equated what the banking interests were doing to ordinary Americans with the crucifixion of Jesus.

Nothing is certain but death and taxes, goes the old saying. Just as certain, it seems, is the human propensity to acquire, and the matching propensity for others to rail against the injustice and unfairness of systems which give too much to some, and too little to others. And on top of it all, it seems, Caesar always looms.

People in 1st century Palestine paid a lot of taxes. Jews had to pay the Temple tax – 21 percent! Everyone had to pay customs taxes on what goods they traded. If you were a farmer (and 90 percent of the population were farmers), two-thirds of what you earned went to the Roman and Jewish elite, through a combination of how much you were taxed and who owned the land you farmed. In those days, they really ensured that the rich got rich and the poor got poorer.[i]

But it was the coin with the face of Caesar that was deeply offensive to all Jews, who lived by God’s commandment not to make graven images. This coin with the face of Caesar had to be used to pay the tribute tax to the Roman Empire. If you used this coin with the graven image to pay the tribute tax, you were breaking one of the Commandments handed down by God to Moses. If you did not use this coin – if you did not pay the tax – the Romans would lock you up for sedition, and that is much worse than being audited by the IRS.

Just about everyone who reads this passage from Matthew acknowledges that Jesus knows that his opponents are trying to trick him with this question, and so he cleverly avoids the trap. He dismisses the problem with the coin as not a theological one at all: this coin obviously belongs to Caesar, so give it back to him. So what? It’s only money.

Then he lays out the theological problem: Give to God what belongs to God.

In our lives, what does belong to our equivalent to Caesar? In our lives, what does belong to God?

Most of us, most of the time, pay taxes. “Caesar” has to know how much money we have, or how much we spend, in order to tax us, and here in the United States, many people spend a lot of money, both legally and under the table, to avoid paying taxes. A lot of people aren’t even “rendering unto Caesar” but shaving a little (or a lot) off the top before Caesar knows what’s happening.

So what do we do with that money that is NOT rendered unto Caesar? With that money that, in the United States at least, does not go into fixing the roads on which we all drive, or the emergency services we all hope will be there when we need them, or the schools where we learned to read and write? How many people seem to exercise a “preferential option for middle class living over living the gospel?”[ii] If we’re not giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, are we giving to God what is God’s?

Think about it: What is God’s? What do we owe to God?

In this gospel passage, Jesus raises the question without answering it. But the way Matthew has arranged these latter chapters of his gospel, we are hit with parable after parable that tell us what Jesus has in mind.

Think about the context: in Chapter 21, Jesus enters Jerusalem – the story we read on Palm Sunday. Chapter 26 is the Last Supper. In between, we read parables, speeches, teaching moments, difficult conversations about the world – often illustrated in the stark economic reality of his day – and about how God’s followers should live in place that has clearly become unjust.

Read over these chapters some time. It is easy to see how they are overlooked, misinterpreted. It is easy to see how the church over the centuries has been domesticated, concerned with small things, with being nice, with being proper, with worrying about sexual morality, who’s in and who’s out. It is much easier to put the stuff we “render unto God” into our buildings or staff or heating bills.

But think about it: if this building and this staff and these heating bills are what we render unto God, what are we doing with them, especially when we look at all that we have in light of the urgency Jesus speaks in these last chapters of Matthew?

Yes, it is stewardship time. What we put in the plate is important, but it is only the beginning. If we are only paying for our maintenance, then yes, we are rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But if we realize that what we are paying for – this building, this place, this community, this table – is a launching pad for what Jesus wants us to do in this unjust, unhealthy and broken world, where people are lonely and isolated and poor and hungry and where what we can do can make a world of difference, then yes, indeed, everything we give, we render unto God.

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[i]  From Marcus Borg, “What belongs to God?” http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2000/04/What-Belongs-To-God.aspx

[ii]  From the Rev. Patrick Brennan, “30 Good Minutes,” http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/brennan_3711.htm

Jesus' business model

Proper 22-A    Oct. 2, 2011

Exodus 20:1-4,7-9,12-20; Psalm 19

Philippians 3:4-14; Matthew 21:33-46

What if the Federal Reserve, or the U.S. Treasury, or the International Monetary Fund, ran by God’s rules? God cares a lot about the economy, if the Gospels are any measure of God’s interests and activities. So think about it: in this perplexing and violent parable – sometimes titled “the wicked husbandman” – Jesus is making the case that God cares about what we do with what we have been given. “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”

What if God said that to the Federal Reserve? To the U.S. Treasury? To the lenders of sub-prime mortgages? To the bankers who have just decided to charge us for using the debit cards they told us to use? To those who spread the risk around and keep the profits to themselves?

“God’s economy” means the way God organizes God’s household, and so what are the rules for living in God’s household? This text reminds us that the penalty is pretty stiff for breaking them – “a miserable death” – so let’s look a little closer at what we have here. If God’s household is this vineyard, then one of the crisis points in the year is the time of harvest. The crop has ripened at once, and there is not a moment to lose to get in all in. Such a crisis is fraught with opportunity and peril. “The harvest is plentiful,” Matthew has Jesus say elsewhere, “but the laborers are few.”

The vineyard, in Biblical imagery, represents sacred land, God’s land, the symbolic place where the people live in obedience to God, to the Torah, the comprehensive way of life that marks what it is to be a Jew. The Torah, or the Law, begins with those 10 Commandments God gave to Moses, and you could say that for a faithful Jew – a faithful Jew like Jesus, or his disciple, Matthew – obedience to the Law is like living always in God’s sacred vineyard. Outside the vineyard, beyond the hedge, is the land of the unfaithful, the wicked, the disobedient, the alien.

But as we read this story, God is not pleased with those who were given the vineyard, who were given the great gift of this relationship with God, this great abundance of the goodness of life. They have squandered all these opportunities. The grapes are sour, wild, useless; all will be laid to waste, the laborers sent “to a miserable death.” All that privilege, all that power, all those riches – all will be taken away from the original tenants and given to those who know the rules of God’s economy, to people who will produce “the fruits of the kingdom.”

When we talk about the kingdom of God, or the reign of God, we know who is on top, who is King of kings, Lord of lords. But the more I think about it, the more I find the word “commonwealth” gets to the heart of what God has in mind for us. I used this word last week, to illustrate another parable of God’s economy. God has created the world, which the people of God hold in common. We are all stewards of this common wealth. The vineyard is an especially rich and blessed part of this commonwealth, and God sends some stewards in just to care for it. But they have neglected their duty to the common good. They have squandered the resources, or kept the wealth to themselves, rather than producing the fruits to be shared for the general welfare of all the people.

When we think of this world as a “kingdom,” our lines of responsibility or accountability only go up, to God. Or take the more modern image of “corporation,” where the managers are accountable only to the shareholders and their bottom line. But by using the word “commonwealth,” those ties of accountability and responsibility reach out to all the community, as well as up to the one who has created this wonderful world we all share.

Maybe this is where “secular” economists have gotten into trouble. They were hoarding this wealth as “theirs alone,” rather than understanding that the wealth belongs to God, and that the uses to which we put this wealth should be God’s uses, for God’s people, for the restoration of the vineyard, for the repair of God’s broken world.

So all this talk of the commonwealth, of God’s economy – these are challenging parables to hear. Jesus means business here, but is it a business model that we recognize? That we can live with?

Or is it one that we cannot live without?

Is this a trick question?

Proper 21 A    Sept. 25, 2011

Exodus 17:1-7
Ps. 78:1-4, 12-16

Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32

What do you think?

I think it would be kind of shocking to be in a group with Jesus and have him throw that question out. I would be so afraid he was trying to trick me! Wasn’t that the way that fictional law school professor did it in the old movie, The Paper Chase? A man had two sons; which did the will of the father? How can you win, answering a question like that?

In the peasant economy of Jesus’ day, this question would be nearly impossible to answer. Oh, we know how Matthew wants us to answer: the first son did the will of the father. Even though he snubbed the father and refused, he did then pitch in and do the work. The second was only a surface do-gooder; he really turned out to be a slacker, a mall rat, a fair-weather son.

In the peasant economy of Jesus’ day, neither son did the will of the father totally, but both sons came through with something. In that peasant economy, the survival of the family was, of course, important, but almost as important – almost impossible to separate from survival – was the honor of the family. And so, the first son shamed his father, by initially refusing to go work, although his later change of heart helped the family survive. And the second son honored the father by his words, but then of course, undermined the family’s survival by not getting the work done.

The question then is not which son would the father choose, but with which son would the father be less angry? This parable is a shock to the economy of honor and shame, for the one who appears to honor the family is really on the outside; the one who appears to shame the family is the one who does the work to support it.

The vineyard, is of course, the kingdom of God, and Jesus tells this parable to upset his hearers. The obviously righteous give lip service to what God wants – what God has always wanted – and the slightly seedy and disreputable are the ones who get it. It’s a hard lesson to hear.

Now Jesus does not say that that slick-tongued slacker son won’t get into the kingdom of heaven; he just says that the ones we least expect will get there first. There is plenty of work to do in this vineyard, and really, really, God has a job for all of us, even those of us who are kind of whiny and reluctant and maybe have to be hit over the head with a 2 by 4 before we get it that we, too, have a job to do. God calls all of us to work in the vineyard today.

This lesson makes it obvious, doesn’t it? It’s God’s vineyard, God’s world, and we are stewards of all the gifts God has given us. The post-communion prayer we’ll use for the next few weeks puts it, I think, very well. It starts out with thanking God, once again, for all God has given us. Then it reinforces our marching orders, spells out just what is involved in this work in the vineyard that God has called us to do:

Take us out to live as changed people,
because we have shared the living bread and cannot remain the same.

There is some cost, isn’t there, to this working in the vineyard. We are given bountiful gifts, but God expects something from us.

Ask much of us, expect much from us, enable much by us, encourage many through us.
So, Lord, may we live to your glory, as inhabitants of earth, and citizens of the commonwealth of heaven.

“Commonwealth” is a word out of the 17th century, a word that Puritans used to describe the world that God had put into their care. They understood that word quite literally: the world is the common wealth for all God’s people. We hold all this wealth, this well-being, this welfare, in common, which is what it means to be stewards. We steward this wealth, which is God’s, which we hold in trust, in common, for all of God’s people. For all of God’s creation.

Think of all the things of which we – you – are stewards: our church home, your family home, the town, village, city or county in which you live.

What does it mean, then, to do the will of God in all of these places? With these people, some of whom are slick-tongued slackers and some of whom look like they don’t belong? What does God ask us to do here? What do we give? How are we changed?

It doesn’t matter who gets in first. Only God decides that; there is really no dress code that we can figure out.

What matters is that we are all here.

What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.” What would be your answer?

Shirkers get paid what they are worth

Proper 20-A; Sept. 18, 2011

Exodus 16:2-15; Psalm 105

Philippians 1:21-20; Matthew 20:1-16

Some of us here are old enough to remember when Jimmy Carter was president. Among the many things that Carter said that no one seemed to like was this comment about a woman on public assistance complaining that she was not getting something due her: “Life is not fair,” Carter said. The press went ballistic. Here was this Baptist, famous for being a born-again Christian, and he says to a poor woman, “Life is not fair.”

The Israelites, wandering in the wilderness, were convinced that life was not fair. Oh, they longed for the fleshpots of Egypt – captivity was better, thought some, than this wandering, lost and hungry, in the desert. They were beginning to doubt that Moses could come through on the promise from God, that he would lead these people to the Promised Land. If we had it bad before, we have it worse now; life is not fair.

So what does God do with these grumblers, these whiners who say life is not fair? God gives them bread – not just a fair portion of bread, but more bread than they can eat. More bread than they deserve. Manna from heaven. Bread upon bread upon bread; life is not fair.

That’s what Jesus is saying in this parable of the workers in the vineyard. Well, maybe he’s saying, Life is partly fair. The workers who labored all day get their full wages. That’s fair. The workers who only put in an hour get a full day’s wages, too. That’s not fair. Life is not fair, but sometimes you get more than you should.

There are a couple ways to look at this parable. The workers in the vineyard live on the bottom rung of the social ladder. Their daily wage was just enough to feed and shelter their families for one day. Jesus is not implying that the landowner is paying his workers extravagantly. He is, however, generous and merciful to all these poor workers, even those who have not put in a full day’s work. Even they will get enough to live on. In the kingdom of heaven, therefore, everyone will get enough. There are no distinctions based on how much you earn; everyone who hears the call to go to the vineyard gets what each deserves, which is, enough.

Now look at this parable in its original context. Many people – Jewish leaders, Pharisees – criticized Jesus for spending time and eating with disreputable sinners. Jesus is making a case for his behavior against the pious who condemned him. If God (the landowner) is merciful to the poor, then I am just doing what God would do. Are you envious because I – because God – is generous? You have enough to meet your needs; why should I not care about these poor?

Either way, we get to the same place. In the kingdom of heaven, a different economic system operates. There is always enough to go around. You can’t get ahead, not matter how hard you work or how skilled you are. Your degree or your skill or your work experience don’t matter; in the kingdom of heaven, life is not fair.

I find it hard to live by these far out kingdom of heaven rules. For several years now we have had a few little sayings, printed nicely, framed and posted around the house, in hopes of inspiring our children to more responsible behavior. “Boredom is a matter of choice, not circumstance.” And “Shirkers get paid what they are worth.” These moral messages did not sink in very deeply with my children, who continue to scatter candy wrappers around, not pick up their dirty dishes, slack off on their homework and expect me to fund their excursions to some place where they can have fun! It sounds like they think they’re already in the kingdom of heaven, and I don’t think they’ve earned it! Why, the next time they complain about being hungry, God might just drop down some manna from heaven, just when I was trying to teach them a lesson about duty and responsibility!

If the kingdom of heaven is not fair, it is just, at least as God defines justice. God’s justice is merciful, abundant, generous, with compassion especially for those who do not appear to deserve it. Those of us who have more than we need don’t always like to hear God’s version of who should get what and how much is “enough.”

On the other hand, perhaps the “work” that is needed in the vineyard of the Lord has nothing to do anyway with what we think is important. Perhaps we are not the good “do-bees” we think we are after all. Perhaps the work Jesus wants us to do mirrors his behavior – his compassion, his mercy, forgiveness. Perhaps those things we think are important just don’t matter to Jesus, and by those standards, we are the shirkers. We are those lazy workers who come in at the end of the day, the ones who really have not put in our time laboring in the fields of the Lord. If we look at it from that point of view, God is being very generous to us who have not done our part. God is not fair.

These parables of the kingdom turn the world upside down. They offer a counter-cultural standard to what our world says is important. Shirkers do get paid what they are worth, but in the kingdom, they are worth very much indeed.

Forgiveness releases us

Proper 19 A     Sept. 11, 2011

Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114

Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

It was very hard NOT to be in New York on September 11, ten years ago. That bright, blue morning, I was getting ready to welcome new students to Northwestern University. That day we were to train the new dormitory staff in how to deal with the diverse spectrum of religious backgrounds they would encounter among their students.

Like most everyone else that day, I gathered with close friends. We watched in stunned silence as smoke bellowed and the unthinkable happened as buildings collapsed. As close as I got to caring for someone worried if a loved one had died was with a business school student from Hong Kong, whose brother worked at the World Trade Center. She finally spoke to him on the phone. A church friend, I later learned, panicked until he heard that his brother, who worked in the Pentagon, was safe.

Over the next day or so, I talked with close friends whose apartment overlooks the Hudson River. Their New Jersey balcony provided a front row seat. Someone in their building didn’t leave his apartment for months. Our friends, both clergy, became emergency responders, bringing water and sandwiches to rescue workers who were even the next day beginning to gather at St. Paul’s Chapel for rest and respite. Months later, we also paid a pilgrimage to that place, on a warm, November evening when we could still smell the fires and watch the trucks carry away massive steel beams.

Everyone one of us has an association, a memory, a friend who was there. Some of you went to help, others know people who died.

How do we remember that traumatic time?

How do we reconcile those memories and feelings with the demands of today’s Gospel? A pointed and even harsh parable of the cost of NOT forgiving those who have done us harm? “How often should I forgive, Lord?” Peter asks Jesus. “As many as seven time?” “Not seven but seventy-seven,” Jesus replies. On the face of it, this is an impossible demand. Impossible.

After the trauma of September 11, came September 12, which many people are remembering this year, too – remembering the time when people all over the world came together in compassion and solidarity. President Bush embraced Muslims, people hung flags, prayed prayers, held strangers and loved ones tight. But the promised of a “new world compassion” was quickly overshadowed by the drumbeat of war. This year, I read, the speakers’ lists at the big memorial events are omitting clergy, or omitting someone’s version of the “right” clergy. “9/11 was this moment that we came together, and it lasted about three-and-a-half minutes,” said religion scholar Alan Wolfe. “The country went from a brief moment of something like unity, to complete Balkanization, and now we’re seeing it in religion and in politics, like in everything else.”[i]

How do we reconcile the horrible effects of global terrorism and war with today’s reading from Exodus, where God acts as the Israelites’ field marshal and the Egyptians are drowned in the sea?

Is the song of triumph over the death of enemies really the song God would have us sing? Centuries ago, the rabbis wrestled with this troubling thought, and told a story about angels watching as the Egyptians drowned. They “wished to utter song before the Holy One,” the rabbis write, “but He rebuked them, saying, ‘The works of My hands are downing in the sea, and you would utter song in My presence!’”

What a relief I felt when I read that story. The person who brought it to my attention put it this way:

How could God chastise the angels when God caused the drowning? The text was not erased, but a new word was spoken. The sages remembered other strands of Torah which called God’s people to care for strangers and foreigners, exiles and wanderers.[ii]

“A new word was spoken,” even as the Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea. What new word comes to our minds today, ten years after an event which traumatized the world?

Maybe today is the time to rethink what we thought was impossible, to forgive those who have harmed us? To forgive not only seven times, but seventy-seven times?

Think about it. Something that has harmed us so deeply can never be forgotten. The pain is part of our history, part of what makes us who we are. But when we add resentment to that pain, angry that that past was not different than what it was, then we stay there. Something that was so horrible in our past is now determining how we lives our lives now, and into the future. If we only look at the history, we will walk backwards into the future. Who wants to live in a future determined by all the bad things of the past? Didn’t Jesus come to show us another way? To remind us that God had always told us there is another way?

Forgive, forgive, forgive: does that mean forgive and forget? Does that mean peace at any price? Does that mean you become buddy-buddy with those who have harmed you?

Forgiveness is not reconciliation. Forgiveness releases us from being trapped by the past, from keeping that past alive in the present. So we can forgive, and even put our hearts at rest, but we may never be reconciled with those who do not share our values. Among Jesus’ last words, as he hung dying on the cross, were “Father, forgive them.” He forgave his killers, but he never reconciled with them. He never agreed with their imperial mission or their death-dealing ways. We can never be reconciled to those who use terror or violence or fear to achieve their goals. But how often must we forgive? Seven times? Seventy-seven?

Reading these lessons on this day reminds us that we have so much work to do, if the human race is to survive on this planet, if this beautiful world that God has created is to continue to sustain life.

But being a person of faith is to know that our blessed future is not determined by our tragic past. In our blessed future, resurrection is a fact. In our blessed future, there are enough resources to go around. In our blessed future, we can live together, despite our vast differences in language and culture. In our blessed future, we can say we are sorry for the wrongs we have done, and the person we have wronged can forgive us, and together we figure out what it means to live in this new creation, to be repairers of the breach, the harm, the pain, that seems to be so inevitable a part of the human condition.

As we try to do all of that, truly, the angels will sing.

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[i] From “Omitting Clergy at 9/11 Ceremony Prompts Protest”, by Laurie Goodstein, The New York Times, 9/8/2011; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/nyregion/omitting-clergy-from-911-ceremony-prompts-protest.html?hp

[ii] Barbara Lundblad, ON Scripture, http://odysseynetworks.org/on-scripture-exodus-14-19-31