I read short, meditative messages from a variety of daily readers, and the one for last Friday particularly spoke to me:
Take a blessing with you wherever you go. You have been blessed, so bless others. Such stores of blessings are awaiting you in the months and years that lie ahead. Pass on your blessings. Blessing can and does go around the world, passing on from one person to another. Shed a little blessing in the heart of one person. That person is cheered to pass it on, and so God’s vitalizing, joy-giving message travels on. Be a transmitter of God’s blessing.
And wouldn’t you know it – later that morning, while driving around in my old Volkswagen Bug, the car attracted the attention of two two young men in a delivery van who pulled up next to us at a stop light. One of them had had a 1970s Volkswagen Bug, and they told us that seeing my Bug really cheered them up!
I often get another hopeful message from a friend concerning my expectations, which is:
“None of us is going to get out of this life alive, but the best is yet to come!”
Today’s readings similarly urge us to look on the bright side, and transmit God’s blessings.
They speak of following God, no matter where our human frailties and desires lure us, and the fact that faith and good works, rather than ridged adherence to the yoke of human law, are the road to a fulfilling destiny. If we can love our neighbors as ourselves, by following him with faith and its corresponding good works, we will find the freedom from bondage that Jesus promised us.
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Larry’s excellent description of Elijah in last week’s Reflection reminds us that he was relentless and violent in his efforts to return an errant Israel to the Lord, to the point of killing every offending prophet at Baal. The God of Abraham is not a gentle one.
In this week’s Old Testament reading we find Elijah on his way to Bethel, where he is to be taken “up to heaven by a whirlwind.” On the way, he encounters a young man named Elisha, upon whom he placed his cloak; his “mantle.” Thereafter, Elisha started following Elijah.
As they walked, Elijah repeatedly urged Elisha to say behind, but Elisha refused.
So, they soldiered on with 50 other followers, and when they reached the Jordan, Elijah used his cloak to part the waters.
Elijah then “ascended in a whirlwind into heaven,” leaving behind his mantle for Elisha, who took it up, parted the waters, and crossed over.
As one commentator put it: “Elisha is the successor of Elijah. God’s person for that hour, as the 50 prophets announced, . . .”
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In the New Testament passage from Galatians, Paul is telling us to avoid the yoke of slavery to our sins, and embrace the liberty by which Christ has made us free.
The slavery he’s talking about is both our self-indulgences, and our becoming slaves to one another and the Old Testament’s Mosaic law. The freedom is found in loving our neighbors, because those who act as if they truly love their neighbors, have kept the law fully.
As written by one commentator: The Mosaic Law given by God emphasized salvation by merit, but Jesus put the emphasis on salvation by the grace of God, through faith in him. It is in concern for the well-being of the other person that the law is obeyed.
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That’s not to say that such freedom is an invitation to loose living. None of us (including Paul) is free from sin or controversy.
Even the Nicene Creed, which was an effort to calm warring factions in the Christian church and whose 1700th anniversary was remembered by Larry last Sunday, is still the subject of controversy about its language and meaning.
But God will forgive us our imperfections as we move toward more loving relations with our neighbors. It is progress toward loving our neighbors that is required, not perfection.
As if to make the point, in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus rebukes James and John when they suggest retribution for the village of the Samaritans who refused to receive Jesus. That’s a demonstration of his loving all of our neighbors, even when we choose to turn the other cheek.
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But we’re still killing each other over territory and in the names of our differently conceived Gods, so is it realistic for us humans to aspire to use only non-violent boundaries when loving our neighbors as ourselves?
So far, the best we’ve been able to do collectively in dealing with the ongoing horror is work through human institutions and laws like the United Nations and the International Red Cross’ law of International Armed Conflict, but that has not stopped the bloodshed.
Doesn’t that amount to us, once again, relying on our own, admittedly limited, frame of reference and institutions, which, as Paul warned in Galatians, constitutes being enslaved by those institutions?
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What if we all made it a personal goal to embrace the grace of God, by good works undertaken to express neighborly love for one another? A friend of mine likes to refer to that idea as an exercise in “enlightened self-interest.”
We just experienced doing that sort of thing during the recent pandemic. In the face of serious adversity, many of us gave and received helping hands and a new sense of community. For me, it helped to restore my faith in God, and in the basic goodness in us all. Out of self-interested necessity, in times of crisis we come together for the common welfare.
Is it too much to hope that we can aspire to the same love for our neighbor on a more day-to-day basis, and without the need for at disaster to motivate us to go in that direction?
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I look for ways to cheer myself up, and have found that, as a general rule, being of service to others works pretty well. Even cleaning the cats’ litter box helps take my mind off my so-called problems, and the state of the world!
Something else that cheers me up is a rose bush in my yard, that blooms several times during the year. Its flowers are a slightly different color with each successive blooming, transitioning over the year from yellow to a kind of orangy-pink.
When we planted it over 30 years ago, I was what I call “a legend in my own mind,” who worshiped the material and enforced the law; and complained bitterly about how much the rose bush cost!
Now, by the grace of God, I expectantly await its first blooms each year, making sure that it is well cared for, and frequently going to the window or outside to admire its beauty.
When Mother Nature makes them available, its blooms adorn the house, and two of them were on the kitchen table with me as I wrote this Reflection.
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It also helps me to think of God in terms of Mother Nature. Acknowledging the relentless evolution of things all around us as being accomplished by Mother Nature is a way in which I am able to conceptualize, and even visualize, the infinite, which is God.
She can be both predictable and spontaneous, beneficial and destructive; but always, and I believe forever, uncontrollable by us.
We will never “best” Mother Nature, although as noted in the old Chiffon margarine commercial, we keep trying to “fool” her. As was said in that commercial: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”
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The result of her often-dramatic actions (which are referred to in the law and by insurance companies as “acts of God”), is that we eventually have to surrender to reality, and cooperate among ourselves to adapt to her “new normal.”
That is more than a metaphor. For me, it better explains Paul’s injunction that if we Christians live by the Spirit; that is, love our neighbors as ourselves, we will inherit the kingdom of God.
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So, I respectfully suggest that God, in the image of Mother Nature, is a good place to look for things to do that will bring our “neighbors” far and wide, together.
In my case, the rose bush has grown high enough to be seen and enjoyed by several of my neighbors. I’ve also shared its flowers with others.
And our church’s neighbors are already tending some of its gardens, so let’s reciprocate by loving them, no matter who they are, what they believe, or where they came from.
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Mother Nature is not too concerned with such things.
