When a Red Light Isn't

“Search for the Lord, and his strength; continually seek his face.” Psalm 105:4

We live in a world of explorers. I like to think I’ve got a pretty good handle on spelling and grammar, yet I find those skills put more and more to the test. Who among us hasn’t found text messages changed by the cell phone’s auto-correct or spell-check features? There are a lot of words in church-life that just aren’t recognized by the Great Brain in the Clouds, so I find myself miffed at times when the computer doesn’t like what I have to say, or the way I’m saying it.

“Hey,” I yell at the infernal clump of electronic detritus, “you’re not the boss of me!”

The computer just hums and chortles electronically; it doesn’t care how long it takes for me to settle down. The computer’s main component is called the mother board for a reason; she IS the boss of me!

For the most part, we get along just fine. I browse the net for news and sports; I check out a few social media sites to see what my friends and family are having for breakfast, where they’re going, what they’re doing, or who they’re doing it with. When I’m curious about something, I go to a search engine and find information that may or may not be correct. I remember Abraham Lincoln’s sage warning: “Just because you see a quote on the internet with my photo doesn’t mean I actually said it.” 

That’s good to know. I know a college professor who once started each class-year with a quote from the Buddha written across the top of her blackboard until one day at the start of a fresh semester one of her students pointed out that the Buddha had never said that. She looked it up online and found it among many quotes falsely attributed to the Buddha on a website dedicated to identifying fake Buddha quotes. I recalled something another friend of mine said: “Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?”

Some things we just have to take on faith, yet it’s good to keep an open mind. I think it was comedian Dennis Miller who used to close his commentaries with, “That’s just my opinion; I could be wrong.” Modesty requires us all to adopt that perspective (but I could be wrong). 

I have found it helpful to keep an open mind. How else will new information get in to be processed? I’ll admit I don’t understand people who are so cock-sure of themselves that they can’t admit to the possibility of being wrong.

I was a cop, brand new on the force. I was sitting at a light in Spokane when my light turned green. Just before I could start up, a fellow crossed in front of me. It was a clear-as-day red light violation, so I pulled him over and wrote him a citation. He was convinced the light was yellow, but I knew better. He took his ticket to court and I testified to the facts, plain and simple. 

But then the judge asked me a question for clarification. “Did you see his light? Did you see if it was red?” Now, I could have lied and said, “Yes.” But I told him the truth. “My light was green, so I knew his light had to be red.” Well, I didn’t actually see him run a red light; I’d drawn a conclusion based on what I’d seen, added to common sense, but I didn’t see him “run” a red light, as a matter of “fact.” 

“Not guilty,” declared the judge.

I learned. I became more careful in my observations. Traffic signals were designed so one could (back in those days) see (and confirm) the shade of cross-traffic lights. I hated losing my very first court case, but became a better traffic officer for it. 

That incident (and many since) have helped shape my approach to the world. I’ve learned to separate fact from assumptions. I’ve learned to step outside my bubble, to be more observant before drawing conclusions. I’ve learned to listen carefully, to engage in critical thinking so as not to be fooled or taken advantage of. I can have my well-formed opinion about things, but I could also be wrong. That’s OK here in this, our valley.

Keith Axberg writes on matters concerning life and faith. Author of: Who the Blazes is Jesus? Good News for a Vulgar World (available through Amazon in Print and e-book)

The Great Value of the "Sinner"

 Proper 18 – VALUE

Sermon for St. Paul’s (Mount Vernon, WA) 09/10/2023

Fr. Keith Axberg, Ret.

Ezekiel 33:7-11 – Our sins weigh against us; how can we live?

Psalm 119:33-40 – Incline my heart to your decrees

Romans 13:8-14 – Love is the fulfilling of Torah

Matthew 18:15-20 – Where 2 or 3 are gathered, I’m there

Give ear O heavens, and I will speak; let the earth hear the words of my mouth! For I will proclaim the Name of the Lord and ascribe greatness to our God.

A story is told of a man washed overboard from a ship at sea. He was stranded on a desert isle. A few weeks later he saw another ship sailing past the island, lit a signal fire and the passing ship stopped. The captain sent a rescue party ashore and the castaway, as you might imagine, was overjoyed to be seen and rescued. The first officer noticed the man had built several huts there on the beach and asked about them.

“Oh, that’s my home. When I landed, I had no idea how long I’d be here, and so I took vines and branches and built myself some shelter. Then I built another hut to store whatever food I could find. This hut over there is my church. That’s where I went to read the Bible and pray.”

The first officer noticed one other hut and said, “And what’s that?”

The castaway said, “That was my first church, but I didn’t care for the leadership, so I left.”

Since the early days of Adam and Eve disobeying God, playing the blame game, and getting kicked out of paradise, we human beings have had a rough time of it getting our act together. 

The rules are pretty simple: Love God; love your neighbor; heck, love yourself, too!

But it’s always a fight. It’s always a struggle. Like Cain, we’re scared to death God loves “them” more than us, so rather than work on improving what we can, we simply get rid of the competition. We let the EGO get the better of us.

In Twelve Step programs, they say that EGO means to Edge God Out (E. G. O.)

That’s really what sin is. It’s edging God out. It’s like the fellow who shoves his way to the front of the line without so much as an , “Excuse me,” or “By your leave.” Somehow they think their time or their needs are more important than yours, so they throw elbows or shoulders.

Most of the time I let grace prevail, even though I know that when you give someone an inch they’ll take a mile and at some point you’ll have to draw a line. What we do, though, is we keep moving that line because we’re too tired to deal with it. We may show grace on the outside, while on the inside we’re still Caining Abel, if you catch my drift.

It’s not good to let this stuff eat at you. Ezekiel says, “If your neighbor is engaged in wickedness, you need to call them out on it. If you do and they change, all well and good. And if they don’t? That’s on them. But if you see bad stuff happening and ignore it, that’s on you!”

The problem, of course, is that we can become hypersensitive to right and wrong, or good and evil. We can become hypervigilant so that everything is under scrutiny. 

Torah says, “You shall do no labor on the Sabbath – it’s a day of rest, set aside for you and God to spend time together.”

That makes sense. But then you get the rules about the rules. A woman shall not keep a needle in her apron because she might forget it’s the Sabbath and try mending her husband’s shirt.” or something like that. 

The goal, of course, is to focus on our relationship with God; to be “holy” because God is holy; to be gracious, because God is gracious; to be loving, because God is loving.

The goal is to cultivate our relationship with God and with one another, and that’s a good thing. But we’re also human, and while being human means to be a reflection of the Divine, it also means we’re angels with dirty faces, like Adam and Eve. 

We’re “sinners,” which means we fall short of where God wants us to be. That doesn’t mean we’re wicked, or evil, or dirty rotten scoundrels (although some of you may be – who am I to judge?). But we fall short. 

We find ourselves at the checkout counter and, if you’re like me, when I have my 2 or 3 items to buy and go to the “15 or fewer items” lane, I COUNT every item the people in front of me have. I can’t help it. I like numbers. I like rules. I love that superior feeling you get when you see someone with 16 items. I don’t say anything, of course, because I’m a nice guy. BUT I KNOW WHO THEY ARE, AND I KNOW WHAT THEY’VE DONE! Eats away

One of the things our faith calls us to is self-reflection. Jesus never says it’s OK to sin. As humans, we’re going to sin. That’s a plain fact of life. We’re going to fall short. We’re going to let God down; we’re going to let our neighbor down; we’re going to let ourselves down, as well. 

In the Gospel today, Jesus tells us what to do when our neighbor lets us down, when they sin against us, when they do us injury.

He says, “When that happens, go to them. Tell them. Work things out if you can.”

That’s all well and good, especially if you’re on the receiving end of that grievance. Basically, Jesus says, “Don’t go whining about it to your friends and neighbors. Talk to your friend about the problem.” 

You can’t solve the problem if you go gossiping about people who offend you, or let you down. Too often people don’t really want to solve the problem. They want allies to stand with them as they bully their neighbors into submission.

So Jesus says, rather than take a little problem and blow it all out of proportion, deal with it directly. But be careful. You’re not God. I’m not God. Your neighbor’s not God. So we need to tread gently. We could be wrong. The issue could be a misunderstanding. 

Since we are all sinners, since each of us falls short, it’s important to look at today’s lesson and realize that there are times I will be the offender (not just the offended); that I will be the one who falls short; that I will be the one who lets someone else down. So I need to be humble enough to listen when someone speaks. 

A woman finds herself fighting with her boss, and her co-workers, and her family members, and her neighbors, and her fellow church-goers, she may have to pause a moment and ask, “Is the world really that full of jerks, or is there some other common denominator at work here creating such a ruckus?”

St. Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans that we “owe one another nothing except to love one another, for those who love have fulfilled Torah.”

Note: Torah doesn’t just mean the Law of Moses. Torah is the story of God calling us out of slavery (whether to Egypt or Sin), and bringing us home (what we call “salvation”). So by loving, we’re living into who we are as the people of God – people who have been and are being delivered from our transgressions.

That’s our mission. That’s at the heart of the Gospel lesson today: God calling us to come closer, to come up higher, to climb into God’s lap. Even if we’re pitching a screaming fit, God invites us to come where God can hold us, and hug us, and quiet us down so that, if we listen closely, we can even hear God’s own heartbeat in that silence. “Where you crawl together, I am there.”

That is the mission of the Church. If you turn into your prayer book to page 855, you’ll see in the Catechism: 

Q. What is the mission of the Church?

A. The mission of the Church is to restore all people to

unity with God and each other in Christ.

   

Q. How does the Church pursue its mission?

A. The Church pursues its mission as it prays and

worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice,

peace, and love.

   

Q. Through whom does the Church carry out its mission?

A. The church carries out its mission through the ministry

of all its members.

Jesus reminds us in the Gospel that in the life of the church, there will always be problems. There will always be issues where we struggle to know the right thing to do. Not everything is a Gospel issue to me, but it could be to you. So Jesus says, “Go; sit; listen; become one again.”

Some years ago Barb and I were living in Spokane; we got a call from my brother in law; my sister (Tina) worked at a butcher shop in Wilbur (a small town about an hour west of Spokane out on highway 2) and while cleaning the deli-meat slicer, she’d cut her finger off. She was rushed to Holy Family Hospital in Spokane, and after several hours, surgeons were able to reattach her finger - reconnecting blood vessels and nerve fibers, and muscles. Whatever they did, it worked. In time, her finger healed. It was a little shorter. It wasn’t quite as flexible as it had been. But the finger lived, because it was once again made part of the body.

It was literally: RE-MEMBERED. 

That, to me, has always been an iconic image of what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel today. It’s not so much about Church Order or Problem Solving.

It’s about valuing one another so much that our desire is NOT to lose one another, NOT to cut one another off, but to recover one another in the Name of Christ Jesus, our Lord. When we break Bread and elevate the Cup, we remember what Jesus told us to do: Do THIS in RE-MEMBRANCE of me. He’s not talking about memorizing the service or the prayer book or the bible, or recalling the institution of the Eucharist. 

He’s talking about placing your life and the life of your neighbor in the hands of the Great Surgeon, who skillfully puts us back together, even when we’ve fallen apart. Each of us is a valued member of the Body of Christ. AMEN

Before I Croak

“Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things.” Psalm 98:1

I was out watering my plants the other day. Although the Pacific Northwest has a reputation for being damp and rainy, the fact is we don’t receive nearly as much rain around here as folks think, and this summer, in particular, has been one of the drier summers on record. Consequently, we head out every couple of days to see to it that the greenery stays that way.

I keep telling my better half that we ought to put in drought-resistant plants, but she has no desire to see silk or plastic flowers in the yard, so I guess we’ll have to settle for live botanical specimens – the real deal, as she calls them. 

I don’t mind watering, to be honest. It is one of those tasks that doesn’t require a lot of brain-power, and there is something meditative about dragging a hose around the yard from the spigot to our botanical family and seeing to it that each plant or bush receives what it needs. Someday we may invest in an automatic sprinkling system, but where’s the fun in that? It’s nice moving about the grounds, talking to the plants and critters. On top of that, they never talk back. Now THAT’s a real blessing!

Despite our relatively urban setting, we do have some wildlife popping in from time to time. A week ago I was getting my morning coffee. It was still relatively dark; I looked out the kitchen window and observed a couple of raccoons wandering around the backyard looking for incredible edibles. I’m no Dr. Dolittle, so I made no effort to converse with them. I didn’t want to frighten them away. I just sipped my coffee and watched them wander from plant to bush to stump doing their particular form of grocery shopping. 

It’s funny how we think. I find myself writing about the wildlife popping into “our” space, as if it’s they that don’t belong. This house and neighborhood have only been here the past three or four decades. The “wildlife” have been here for hundreds of thousands of years. Which of us is the one that “doesn’t belong,” eh?

How else are we to think, though? I suspect raccoons see the world through their own lenses, as do the deer, blue jays, squirrels, and every creature great and small. I have one bush out back that is home to at least one smallish frog. It does NOT like it when I water his or her home. It leaps out from under the leaves, into the open (where I’m sure it does not want to be), and does a frantic little froggy pirouette to see where it can go to either get out of the artificial rain or back under cover. It’s not my intention to disturb its abode, but it doesn’t care what my intentions are. I’m sure, in fact, it wishes I would just croak.

I find nature fascinating. Aside from the odd class here and there in school (back when the earth was still cooling), I wasn’t too much into biology or the other earth sciences, but I am now. I guess that means I am reaching a point in life where some may say, “he’s older than dirt,” and I hear it not as a put-down, but as a scientific fact. The earth and I are related – my own theory of relativity (Move over, Einstein!).

I don’t know if anyone else thinks about such things, but I do. I’ll admit I don’t want mice, ants, or spiders invading my indoor spaces, but I am striving to be more of a friend than a pest when spending time outdoors. My hope is that, when I wander about the great out-of-doors, all of God’s creatures will sing to the Lord a new song, “for he has done marvelous things.” I hope they’ll acknowledge the effort I am making to be kind and gentle. 

When I stand before my Redeemer, it would be sweet to hear even the frogs sing, “He had a good heart. We toad [sic] him to keep the hose on a gentle setting, and he did.” At least that’s my hope here in this, our valley.

Keith Axberg writes on matters concerning life and faith. Author of: Who the Blazes is Jesus? Good News for a Vulgar World (available through Amazon in Print and e-book)