Think And Let Think

Many things about today feel terrible. There is political chaos as we wrestle with the “meaning” behind the midterms and wonder about what will happen to our country. The “national leadership” continues to bicker about everything on a two-week cycle such that we regularly forget what we’re talking about. And this week marked the 307th mass shooting in our country this year. For the sake of context: today is the 314th day. And it’s against that same kind of frightening and turbulent domestic scale, that we get the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz...

There are lots of liturgical moves that can be made on this day, but All Saints also raises a lot of questions, in fact some of our most profound questions: Who and what are we really? Is there anything permanent in the universe? Do our lives have any meaning? And those questions can be far more spooky and frightening than anything we might’ve encountered on Halloween.

Where is the hope in the middle of such terrible suffering? What does it mean for us to live in a world where the blind wait by the roadsides for help? Is this all life has to offer?

Jesus’ rebuke of the thunder brothers might sound harsh to our modern and prejudiced ears, but it’s actually a promise. Jesus promises that we need not live in fear, we need not wake up every morning worrying about our security, we need not scheme to accrue as much power as possible. But Jesus doesn’t promise our protection, or our safety, or even our power - Jesus promises us the cross!

The uncomfortable comfort and the impossible possibility of our salvation is that we worship a God who, in spite of our best and worst intentions, desires our salvation even when we cling to the things we know we should not.

In the US there is one divorce every 36 seconds. That’s nearly 2,400 per day, 16,800 per week, and 876,000 per year. Divorce is one of the most remarkably prevalent occurrences in our culture and society to the degree that most of us have become numb to it, and we almost never talk about it in church. We don’t take it very seriously.

Food is important! And yet here, in America, our connection with and to our food is one that has altogether lost its sacredness. 20% of all American meals are eaten in car. And the overwhelming majority of those meals are consumed alone. 1 out of every 5 children will go hungry, multiple days without eating, at least once a year. And among Black and Latino children the rate is 1 in 3. And somehow (!) we throw away more than 40% of our food every year - a waste of $165 billion annually. We are what we eat (or don't, apparently).

Prayer is at the heart of the Christian life. It is something Jesus consistently did throughout the gospels, it is something we do here every single week, and I would venture to guess that most of us here, in a variety of ways, pray every day. But prayer, with all of its prevalence in the church, is something we don’t really talk about. Sure, we might do it, but what is the it we are doing?

For many of us The American Dream has become The American Nightmare when it comes to money and finances. So many of us are unwilling to delay gratification and we use tomorrow’s money to finance today’s lifestyle. Few us us save money appropriately because we keep thinking that tomorrow won’t come. But then it does. Over and over again.

In the United States there are more self-storage facilities than Starbucks and McDonalds combined! With the crazy and ridiculous ways that we are accumulating more items than we could ever possibility need, far too many us us are are focusing on earthly things instead of heavenly things.

Time is a harsh mistress.

Being a Christian isn’t popular, and it certainly isn’t easy. Paul calls for us to put on the armor of God because we’re going to need it!

When we, the church, are out of touch with our vocation it’s as if we’re stumbling around in the darkness like drunken fools. We might feel a welcome reprieve from the mundanity of life, we might get the hit we need to forget our frivolity, but without our call we cease to be the church.

We are an angry people, we Christians, and that's okay. We worship a Messiah who spent most of his earthly ministry being angry. But our anger, like Christ's, should not send us into despair or violence. Our anger, like Christ's, should send us to an even stranger place: truth.

There is a tremendous difference between loving one another (like Christ), and being nice. Being nice often means being quiet, and not calling out the behavior of others. Loving like Jesus however, often means speaking up and actually calling someone out. Easier said than done.

God loves us and there's nothing we can do about it.

Jesus’ peace is greater than any earthly vision we could possibly imagine. It is more powerful than any political policy, it is mightier than any magistrate’s order, it is more life giving than any piece of legislation. Jesus’ peace is revolutionary.

This country, and our love of it, flirts very closely with what Jesus called idolatry. When the country we live in becomes more important than the God who created us, when the lights in the sky on the 4th of July shine brighter than the bread and cup on this table, when we care more about what’s happening in Washington DC than what’s happening in our local community, then we have a problem. And part of the problem is that, like with David, we forget the tremendous cost of our victory.

We need Jesus to smack us across the head not with smooth stones from the wadi but with the hard wood of the cross. We need to be brought low to the ground before we can be raised high. We need to be defeated in order to be redeemed.

We complain about politics all the time. We hold our elected leaders to standards that we ourselves do not adhere to. And when they disappoint us we act as if no one could have predicted this. But we get the politicians we deserve.